The planet was mostly barren except for a few rock outcroppings. In the sky, the two stars that had started their journey across the sky long before anyone remembered drifted ever closer to the horizon. The surface was teeming with life. Bird-like creatures danced through the air while many other creatures skittered around the ground below. They were all green, gaining their energy from the stars above. They had never known sleep because the stars have never set. They lived without conflict or disease and had never witnessed death.

One of these creatures had a long, chitinous body with a single eye stalk on one end and a long tail on the other. Each of their six legs ended in a point, so the air was always full of the sound of skittering. Their body shone a magnificent grassy green in the sunlight. They spent their days playing with others of their kind. Their closest friend was a slightly darker shade of green.

At the moment, the two were playing their favorite game. The first tapped their front left leg in a sequence and waited. They then felt the responding sequence come from the creature’s left but their were unsure of the exact direction. They moved closer the direction of the vibration and tapped again. This time, when the response came, they knew from which rock. They hurried around the rock to find their friend and the round was over. As the rounds went on, the stars had touched the horizon. The shadows of the rocks grew longer than they had ever been but the creatures were too busy to notice.

Later, they decided to join with the local group of their species. On they way back, they noticed that the area was noticeably darker. Unsure of what this meant, they hurried faster to the group. They arrived at the local place of gathering to find all the local creatures frantically tapping away furiously to try and figure out if anyone else knew what was happening. Their attempts at communication were in vain due to the shear amount of people trying to communicate at once, drowning each other out. The creature and their friend left the chaos to hang out in their usual spot.

They sat under a small cliff looking out at the first sunset they had ever seen. As the stars finally crossed below the horizon, darkness flooded the area and the creatures’ saw nothing before them. The creature looked up at the sky, once filled with light to see the moons had become crescents, providing light that paled in comparison to the starlight. The sky was also dotted with small blips of light shining from distant stars.

They sat there motionless for what seemed like hours, too afraid to move in the inky world before them. Suddenly they felt the vibration of a small impact in front of them but were still too fearful to approach it. As their eyes began to adjust to the light, they saw a dark mass on the ground where the vibration came from. The creature inched toward it to inspect it, more comfortable now that it had some sense of vision. They nudged it with one of their front feet and got no response. They did it again, with a bit more force, and the object rolled over. The creature suddenly realized what lay before it. It was one of the flying creatures, motionless. The creature turned to their friend and tapped to tell them what it was.

They walked back to the main group, without haste as they had begun to feel a bit weak. They found the group mostly in the same state the bird was in, with some sluggishly moving around, not knowing what to do. The reality of the situation soon set in on the two of them. Soon, they would be like the others of their kind, motionless.

Their instincts took ahold of them as they left the area to find the light that had left them. They made sure to pace themselves, as to not further the effects the darkness had on them. They made it quite a distance before it started to become difficult to walk. The ground around them lacked the pock marks made by their feet, indicating they were quite far from home. As they tried to drag themselves toward the horizon where the light had gone, The darker green one collapsed and became motionless. Not wanting to leave them behind, the creature stopped forcing themselves onward and stayed with their friend.

As they sat there, with their motionless friend, desperation began to take its hold. For whatever reason, The creature saw the body before them not as a friend, but as a means to go on. Without thinking, the creature began to pry at the body’s chitins, scrabbling to get them off. Beneath, they found the soft insides and their body took over. The creature’s mouth which had never been used before opened on its own as they began to feast on the body. The creature’s mind became fuzzy not thinking as it ate the meat that lay before it.

Once they finished, they scurried out into the darkness desperate for more. It hurried with speed they had only had in the daylight. They quickly moved, searching out the nearest meat to consume. They nearly tripped over one of the flying creature’s corpses and quickly gobbled it down. The body had no chitins and was much easier to consume. The mind of the creature had gone but it knew deep down where there were more bodies. It hurried back the way it came.

The creature raced its way towards the meeting area to find it how they left it. One of the creatures that had resisted the weakness from the darkness looked surprisingly at the creature moving towards it at unseen speed and wondered how they were not tired. The creature barreling at them could not be stopped in its conquest and devoured the creature before it knew what was happening. The beast barely had the capacity to carefully remove chitins as it ripped its way through the field of bodies that lay before it. Having gorged itself on its own kind, the beast now rest in the carnage it had made, satisfied.

The beast awoke to the rising of the stars on the horizon opposite to where they had set. They had never experienced sleep and arose feeling refreshed. In their rampage the previous night, the beast had grown larger and its chitins were noticeably thicker and more jagged. Their body had lost its pleasant green hue and now was as dark as the night. As the light hit their eye, their pupil became a vertical slit, whereas before it was always round. In their haze the previous night, the beast had missed consuming some of the creatures, who now awoke to see the horror. They ran off in instinctual fear at the carnage and the hulking beast that caused it.

The creature had now regained its senses and looked around horrified at what they had caused. While trying to grasp what had happened, the creature realized that even though the sun had risen, they lacked the energy they had the previous day. The creature’s stomach howled and they knew that they wanted to eat again. To their disgust, they picked through the scraps they had left the previous night and choked down what they could.

Now alone, the creature thought about what they had become. The light was no longer enough to sustain them and they would soon need to kill again. If they had stayed with the group, this wouldn’t have happened. They would have peacefully fell into the slumber and awoken with everyone else in the morning. Instead, they chose to preserve their, as they saw it ending and used the others as a means to do so. Now they sit in solitude, surrounded by the first deaths the planet had ever seen knowing that they were the cause of it. Now that the creature found itself in such a situation, everyday it must now make the same choice. Kill others to survive or die to prevent the killing.

The creature gained a grasp of this and moved out into the light to continue its selfish pursuit of life.